3 December 2000
© 2000 Grant M. Gallup
Zechariah 14:4-9. The final struggle
Psalm 50 Deus deorum. God will come and not keep silent.
I Thessalonians 3:9-13 Timothy brings news of faith and love
Luke 21:25-31,Luke cites Mark (& Shakespeare:) If winter comes, can Spring
be far behind?
The Bible promises here that this generation will not pass away till all be fulfilled, till all has taken place. And gives us some signs of the end times. One day a generation ago a "chittlin'" first arrived on my breakfast plate one Thanksgiving morning on Chicago's west side at the home of an African-American parishioner. They told me it was soul food. Up till then, I thought grits was soul food. But chitterling it's spelled; chittlin' it's pronounced. The lining of a hog's guts, cleaned for ever and boiled for hours, filling the house with slaughterhouse smells. After them, I knew that the Bible was right: my generation had not passed away, and all had been fulfilled.
Every generation passes away, while we aren't looking. Every generation since the time of Jesus has been tempted to believe that the generation referred to in apocalyptic literature is its own, that now indeed we are living in the "last times." It will now only be a few days, or weeks, or months; and in every century since, groups and sects have gathered around their visionary leders and gone to mountain tops to wait for the Coming. And in each as well "some foul beast, his day come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born," to parody, blaspheme, and betray the promise. Today, Palestinian children are the holy innocents slaughtered for Zionist lebensraum in the West Bank.
A few years ago, it was a group that called itself "Heaven's Gate," but they turned it into Hell's Gate for those who abandoned hope and entered there. Today, one of the saner groups--the Seventh Day Adventists--are among the fastest growing religious groups in the U.S., and I think they're right about Saturday as the Sabbath, but wrong to abandon chittlin's and Sunday as the First Day of Forever. Each year on the Sunday nearest St. Andrew's day, all of us turn into Adventists for a season--First Day Adventists, indeed, celebrating the day beyond days, a day of continuous day, and "light at evening time." Which is why we are here on the First day of each week--to hold each other up, to see each other face to face so that each may supply what is lacking in the other. The Puritans liked to name their children out of the Bible, and our epistle lesson from Thessalonians supplies one such name: May the Lord make you "Increase" and abound in love. Thus a Mather was Increased. In Advent, we look back to Jesus' first coming, and forward to his birth in each other's lives. Paul prays that we may increase and abound in love so that our hearts may be "established", with no need of alibis, and unblameable in holiness before God, Jesus, and the saints. We shall all be involved with each other's version of the facts, face to face. "Cara a Cara"--Face To Face-- the revolutionaries here in Nicaragua used to call their chats with their political leaders. No holds barred, all faces unveiled. In these meetings, obreros and campesinos addressed the president of the Republic as "Compaņero."
The gospel tells us that merely historical phenomena will not presage the end, that the end times will be signified (and dignified?) also by cosmic collapse and chaos: signs in the sun and the moon, serious disorders in nature. But with all of this, it encourages us: SURSUM CAPITA -- "Lift up your heads" (not lift up your capitalism!)--instead, lift up the part you think with. Because your liberation is near, Look Up. Sister Penelope of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin wrote in her little book "The Coming", that "human beings are rational animals, built [physically] to look forth beyond themselves in soul and body." We are called "homo sapiens"-- upright higher mammals. Wes tand up on our legs and look Face to Face at each other, "till we have faces" wrote C. S. Lewis, to look God in the eye. Jesus tells us to look up and raise our heads, not to cower or look away shifty-eyed and ashamed. As a child, I never thought much of slouching in a pew, bowing the head and pinching the bridge of the nose as the calisthenics of prayer. But thus I was trained in what was called Sabbath School on Sundays. It was years later that I learned at mass instead: Stand up and Sursum Capita, and Sursum Corda. The day of the Lord is to be searched out, looked into, sought after, watched for, with lifted hands and hearts.
"Still shine the stars." The sun and the moon and the stars will be missed by many who never take time to Sursum Capita. We still live in a world of nature and of grace, and Life is a Miracle. Don't get drunk with occupations, don't let money-grubbing and even earning a living and "killing" your time weigh you down. Jesus' coming will then be a snare instead of a liberation. Jesus says, Look at the fig tree, for example. You can tell when it's coming into blossom that summer is near (or whatever tree you have, Luke adds for those far from figs). Look at the Evergreen of the North, the mango tree of Managua: --in Chicago, when you see truckloads of balsams, you know Christmas is near, and the return of old Sol. In Managua, when you see carts full of mangos, you know that Semana Santa is not far off, and the Risen Lord. Jesus says there are also vital signs that Jesus' Second Time is about to burst upon us. Some years ago in Chicago, just after Thanksgiving, two little boys, eight or ten years old, nearly knocked me down as they flailed their way out of a revolving door in a downtown department store. They and the security guard who pursued them knocked over the fat red kettle of the Salvation Army Santa Claus out front. His bell, and the kettle's crash, got everyone's attention as the urchins vaulted like tiny reindeer--"On Comet! On Cupid! On Donder and Blitzen!" I was secretly glad they got away. The Holiday season had arrived. Again this year, the TV news assures us that all is going smoothly--sales are up in all the stores.
Shoplifting is merely an alternative form of shopping--a variant form of consumerism. Shopping is the chief sacrament of consumerist culture. Stealing is attendant to it, as Lying is attendant upon political campaigns. Last Sunday--a few days ago-- while I was starting this homily on my word processor, the first of the Christmas shoppers cat burglared their way over the roof into Casa Ave Maria, my home in Managua, and tiptoed away from the sala with the VCR, a new $20 adio/cassette player I had planned to give away at Christmas--still in its Walgreen wrapper, a BB gun I once used to silence a noisy pigeon nesting in a rain gutter (and never used it again I was so sorry) and a dear old camera that I could never get to focus. The cat burglars of Cristo Rey Sunday, with their miserable loot and the urchins of the revolving door were actually not much different from ruling class Episcopalians doing their shopping on the Internet. All are pushed by the compulsion, the fantasy that to own is to BE, that to get is to GROW, that we are what we OWN. "The one who dies with the most toys wins."
John Paul II wrote years ago (in 1988) in his encyclical Sollicutudo Rei Socialis"(4:28): "All of us experience firsthand the sad effects of this blind submission to pure consumerism. In the first place a crass materialism, and at the same time a radical dissatisfaction because one quickly learns, unless one is shielded from the flood of publicity and ceaseless, tempting offers of products, that the more one possesses the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled."
Paul wants us to have an INCREASE this Advent time, and prays that the increase will come in the love we have towards each other and towards all human beings, not an increase in material goods (not for ourselves at least, who have so much) but an increase in, an abounding abundance of love.
And Paul wants us to have unblameable hearts. I now have had a total of seven coronary bypasses, since the two new ones last February, so the analogy of hearts has made more and more sense to me each year. The ancient world believed that the heart was the center of emotions--its relationship to the circulatory system is not set forth in the Scriptures. But they do set forth that it had something to do with the center of life and feeling. They knew it could be choked with the cares of the world and the fat of the land, though they didn't know about cholesterol. The prayer of the apostle is that our lives may be capable of taking on an increase in love, that we have our hearts established, that is, strengthened, and blameless; that our stress tests will show that it is functioning just fine. The surfeit of consumer goods in our lives, blind us to the carcity and hunger all around us, usually out of sight. "One of the greatest injustices in the contemporary world," John Paul continues in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, "consists precisely in this, that the ones who possess much are relatively few and those who possess almost nothing are many. It is the injustice of the poor distribution of the goods and services originally intended for all." The vast expenditures of the Me First World on armaments and weapons systems, symbolized by the security guard outside the Christmas windows at Marshall Fields, becomes a part of the consumerist system. As Paul talks of our hearts, Jesus talks about our heads: "Sursum Capita" --and we sing our response: "We lift them to the Lord." Lift like bread and wine our brains and thoughts. Our human-ness, our reason, our critical faculties, our analysis of history and current events. John Paul calls us to be in solidarity with our neighbors everywhere in the world with a solidarity that is "not a feeling of vague compasion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people both far and near" but is instead, "a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good."
To lift up our heads enables us to see beyond our own plates, which already have too much upon them. "Heads up!" to look out how we may do justice, look out actively for ways to DO the gospel, and look for the Second Advent.
The events which Jesus describes as being a sign of the coming of the Child of Humankind are really things that happen in every age of our history. Eclipses, solar and lunar, comets, meteors, occur in every age. There is political dislocation in every century, nations in perplexity, elections in peril. Hurricanes and typhoons and terremotos and volcanoes in them all. There is the phenomenon of human failure and despair and the "very powers of heaven" are shaken, and the faiths and religions of earth. Empires perish, philosphies that shaped the centuries are toppled, and certainties that comforted the masses are snatched away.
But Jesus says that is in these events and through them that we may always discern a human future-- "the Son of Man" means that at least--that we may discern a new humanity on the way, 'though in a cloud, and with strength and authority from beyond.
The winter solstice, on December 21st, when the day is shortest and the night longest, is when the turn-around happens, and it is Christmas time, when the old world draws on through the first of shortening nights towards the Dayspring from on High. The prophet Zechariah spoke of the day of the Lord as one in which the cold and frost will be gone--that there will be Day, and "light at evening time". We accomplish that easily enough by falling our clocks back in the Fall, and springing them forward in the Spring. These too are symbols for the coming of the Lord, and his return with all he saints to take part with us in a new way of relating to each other in the human commuity, a new way of being which does not have to do with getting and spending, but with loving and being. When you see EHESE things happen, you know that the Reign of God is near.
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